Rev. Forrest Church, Who Embraced a Gospel of Service, Dies at 61

The Rev. Forrest Church, a longtime pastor at the Unitarian Church of All Souls on the Upper East Side who spent the last three years of his life, after being told he had terminal cancer, articulating a philosophy of death and dying and a complete expression of his liberal theology in two books, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 61. The cause was complications of esophogeal cancer, said his wife, Carolyn Buck Luce.

As the senior minister to the liberal and affluent All Souls congregation since 1978, Mr. Church preached a message of love, compassion and social service in stirring fashion, inviting his listeners on a shared quest.

“I don’t come thundering out of the pulpit with the quote unquote truth,” he told People in 1996. “I am involved in a search, and all of my conclusions are tentative.”

He set up a shelter for homeless women in Harlem, started a scouting program for boys and girls at a welfare hotel and organized free lunches and dinners for the homeless. In 1985, early in the AIDS epidemic, he organized a task force to place placards on buses and subways reading “AIDS is a human disease and deserves a humane response.”

He also wrote nearly two dozen books, many of which applied his theology to everyday life. They included “God and Other Famous Liberals” (1991), “Life Lines: Holding On (and Letting Go)” (1996) and “Lifecraft: The Art of Meaning in the Everyday” (2000).

“Much more than a parish minister, he was a writer, thinker and public intellectual of consequence,” Dan Cryer, who is at work on a biography of Mr. Church, wrote in an e-mail message on Friday. “In the ’80s and ’90s, he was a key national spokesman challenging what he depicted as the religious right’s hijacking of flag, family and Bible. He was an eloquent public speaker and commentator on radio and television who also wrote books of enormous spiritual power and who, as a historian, showed great insight into the nuances of church-state relations in American history."

Mr. Church wrote and preached with particular eloquence on life, love and death. In 2006 he was told that he had inoperable cancer of the esophagus and had only months to live.

That prognosis turned out to be incorrect. He underwent what appeared to be a successful operation, but in 2008 doctors discovered that his cancer had returned and had spread to the lungs and liver. On five separate occasions he delivered what he thought would be his last sermon.

His illnesses motivated him to write “Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow” (2008) and a final book summing up his religious philosophy, “The Cathedral of the World: A Universalist Theology,” to be published in November by Beacon Press. While battling cancer, he also completed “So Help Me God” (2007), a study of the religious views of the first five presidents.

Photo

The Rev. Forrest Church at All Souls Church last year.Credit
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

“Every minister spends a lifetime preparing to ace the death test,” he said on the PBS program “Religion and Ethics” in February. “It’s what we do. We can’t fail that test, having gone through it with so many others.”

Frank Forrester Church IV was born on Sept. 23, 1948, in Boise, Idaho. His father was Frank Church, who later became a Democratic senator from Idaho, ran against Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential primaries and went on to serve as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

After earning a bachelor’s degree at Stanford in 1970, the younger Mr. Church enrolled in Harvard Divinity School, where he received a master’s degree in 1974. He earned a doctorate in early church history from Harvard University in 1978.

His speaking style was direct, and he expressed his religious philosophy in simple terms. “Do what you can,” he often said, “want what you have, and be who you are.” When he took the job, church attendance hovered around 100 on Sundays. Today, it is not uncommon for 1,000 worshipers to attend.

In addition to technical works on Christian and Gnostic literature, his books included “Father and Son: A Personal Memoir of Senator Frank Church of Idaho,” which was published a year after his father’s death in 1984, and many works on religion and American history aimed at a general audience. These included “Our Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism” (1989) and “The American Creed: A Biography of the Declaration of Independence” (2002).

While married to his first wife, Amy Furth Church, he met Ms. Luce as a member of his congregation. Their ensuing affair caused a public controversy, but the congregation voted overwhelmingly to keep him as senior minister.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his mother, Bethine, and a brother, Chase, both of Boise; two children from his first marriage, Frank Forrester Church V of Flushing, Queens, and Nina Church-Adams of Brooklyn; and two stepchildren, Jacob Luce of Manhattan and Nathan Luce of Golden, Colo.

In late 2006 he retired as senior minister of All Souls and became minister of public theology, a position that allowed him to preach on a limited schedule, officiate at weddings and memorial services and write on current issues in public theology and religion.

“I look back without regrets, and I look forward without fear,” he told The New York Times in 2008. “I have never been more in the present.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 27, 2009, on Page A28 of the New York edition with the headline: Forrest Church, 61, Dies; Preached a Gospel of Service. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe